Shooting Raw

I little while ago a friend asked if i could help him to work on a Post processing of a Photo. He came to my office and he brought the Images on an USB Stick.

I opened the USB-Stick and asked him where he has put the Images i can see only jpeg’s and he answered that this images are the images straight out of his Canon 5D Mark II.
My Question was only: “Why do you not shoot in RAW?”. He answered that the RAW Format is to big and he can he can not really see a benefit to shoot in RAW.

I couldn’t believe what i have heard. So i started to explain to him whats the advantage of the RAW Format

1. Flexibility
   The only Parameters which you have to pay attention to is the fstop, Shutterspeed and ISO. All the other Parameters like White-Blance, Color-Correction and the other creepy stuff its the job of the RAW-Converter.
2. Quality
   Because of the posibility to save the Image with up to 16 bit there is a lot more gradation of Colors.
   A little Excurs jpg vs RAW
   JPG: A jpg File is a 8bit Format every Pixel has a Brightness Depth of 2^8 = 256 that means that one pixels stores only one value out of 256 possible shades of a color and because there are Three colors RGBthe Color-Depht is 256^3 = 16,777,216 possible Colors
   RAW: A RAW File with 12bit as example every Pixel has a Brightness Depth of 2^12 = 4096 that means that one pixel stores a value out of 4096 possiblities and Because of the Bayer-Interpolation of three Colors there are 68,719476,740 possible Colors
   Ok the Human Eye is only able to see about 16 Mio. Colors but if you use Raw, the gradiation is much better then a jpg image
3. Details
   Because of the Color-Depth it is possible to get much more Details out of a RAW-Image with a RAW Converter
4. lesser Color jumping
   Because the jpg can not store so much Color-Gradients it is possible that if you have a image with a extrem gradient like a sun-set, from really dark to a really bright color, that the gradient color jumps at a point in another color. And because of the much higher Color-Depth of the RAW Format the possiblily of color jumping is much less then in the jpg format.
5. The RAW Converter Software
   the Processor of the DSLR is manufactured with the premise to be leightweight, to save Energy and  low heat emission. A Computer Processor is not designed this way. A Computer Processor has much more Power and RAM. A Camera Processor has to do the converting real quick, nobody wants to wait 10 or 20 secs. to see the image on the Camera Display. So the converting method in the DSLR is quick and dirty. A external converter has much more complex algorithms then the DSLR.
6. No lossy compression
   Because of the compression of a jpg file there is the possiblity of jpg fragments
7. Multiple Converting
   Because you can change the settings in the RAW converter it is possible to work with two or more different setting on the image. With the Power of Photoshop or GIMP you can get more details out of an image.

I think these are 7 very good reasons to shoot in RAW.

I shoot RAW since i had my first DSLR with the possiblity of the RAW format.